IT IS easier to pass a carrot through the eye of a needle than through the lips of a nine-year-old boy.

I haven't actually tried the former but having lost count of the number of ways in which I have attempted the latter I can imagine that it simply has to be easier.

It's been a while now since I was nine, and I suppose like most parents I have lost touch with the priorities of a nine-year-old mind.

It's a fascinating time of life, a pivotal moment in the development of a young man when he can quite happily watch insects crawling under someone's skin in a movie like Men in Black, but is still liable to faint when confronted with a portion of broccoli.

If I speak with an air of authority on this subject, then it's because there is a strong element of deja vu in the current goings-on at the dinner table at Owen Towers.

But if I thought a few years ago that my 12-year-old had cornered the market in cunning ways to avoid the consumption of nutritious food, then I was sadly mistaken.

Son number two has clearly learned first-hand from a master and, as he showed at the weekend, developed his own even more maddening repertoire of evasion tactics.

And it's not all just about vegetables. Give him chicken wrapped in breadcrumbs, or a sliver off the Sunday roast and he'll wolf it down like it's going out of fashion. He even eats chicken tikka masala.

But, strangely, if you dice up a chicken breast, drop it into a delicious casserole and ladle it lovingly onto his plate, he'll put up the shutters faster than you can say "McDonald's".

"Not hungry?" I asked as he volunteered to leave the table to get the orange juice carton to top up his brother's glass. Such rare generosity towards his brother - his first gambit in a succession of manoeuvres designed to allow the undesirables on his plate to go cold - was not made any less transparent by his reply of "Starving!"

Gambit number two was drinking a lot, the advantage being that it makes you look busy.

Wheeze number three was cutting up his food, sticking it on his fork, and then moving it around his plate, hiding the nastier-looking chunks in his dollop of mash. (Not only do you look busy but the portions doled out by Dad are rendered less recognisable and valuable seeds of doubt are sown, especially when accompanied by a vigorous chewing motion.)

In the following 15 minutes he excused himself from the table to go to the loo, launched a variety of conversational diversions and even professed a sudden interest in the signature on a framed print on the kitchen wall.

"Yes, it is a Vermeer," he confirmed with a measure of confidence.

With his food all but cold, and his father still gently but firmly on his case, we eventually arrived at the business end of dinner, negotiation time.

"If you eat this and half of that then you don't have to eat that over there," I ventured.

"What? All of this and half of that?" he replied, seeming mortally offended.

The bargain finally struck, he swallowed down some chicken with all the gusto of Jennie Bond eating grubs in the jungle and ran off into the living room. This routine drives me mad but I suppose I'll probably miss it when he's 12 and hoovering up the leftovers like his brother.